


I Know The Voices Dying

by katakokk



Category: Chronicles of Narnia (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-18
Updated: 2010-07-18
Packaged: 2017-10-10 16:02:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/101557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katakokk/pseuds/katakokk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Time moves forward in an endless cycle, the same but different. Jadis and time, because a witch never really dies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Know The Voices Dying

**Author's Note:**

  * For [liminalliz](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=liminalliz).



> Written for liminalliz for the 2009 Narnia Exchange.
> 
> Title from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot.

  
She floats, stretched out flat on her back. Here, it is just her and her thoughts, her failures, her victories.

+

She spends much of her time waiting. Waiting, prowling, crouching in wait for the chance to pounce on opportunity. The entire world is a black expanse of nothingness, and yet she knows. She hears all of history play out before her: battle cries, splendid feasts, and weeping, always weeping.

Telmarines invade the land she once ruled and she scoffs. Pitiful creatures despair at their misfortune and pain and she laughs. Misfortune? Suffering tenfold will occur when she returns and rules over Narnia again and she will enjoy it. This is how it will be.

Her laugh echoes back and distorts, though there are no walls.

+

Occasionally, she descends into other countries, but it is not the same as the first.

Always, she is blinded by the burst of color; even the grainy browns of Calormen and the dark greys of Telmar are too bright after timeless time spent floating. Sometimes she simply banishes color for a while.

Slowly, she plants seeds of strife: doubt, bloodlust, violence. The people descend into anarchy and the streets run red for thousands of years afterwards. She flies in, riding the violence and screaming their destinies.

Sometimes, she does not have the patience to play with weak minds and forgoes slow torture for quick death. But always she screams their destinies.

+

They call her different names: Lady of the Void, Blood Queen, She Who Is Suffering.

She writes her own way into history.

+

Mostly, she thinks. About her failures and the reasons behind her downfalls, about future plans, about how utterly idiotic King Caspian V's faith in the western mercenaries is.

+

She failed, all those years ago when she still wore white, because she had run across a child, a Son of Adam. She remembers him well: dark hair and pale skin while he shivered in her prisons. She'd enjoyed that. She had commandeered the expansive land of Narnia but never had she felt such delight, such pleasure. Only then, when she'd known she held his life in her hands, had she felt _complete control_ over someone's existence. She had toyed with others before, drawn their lives out to the limit and then some, but he had been different. The Son of Adam's life had fluttered, delicate and fragile, and she had longed to make it sputter slowly, oh so slowly. It'd delighted her to know that in one instant, she could shatter Edmund Pevensie.

Of course, then the Lion had offered up himself in the Son of Adam's place and while she'd still wanted to make him scream, she had accepted the Beast's offer. To toy with a human child was one thing, but to toy with the hearts of all the Narnians! Without their Lion, they were hopeless. They would attempt to resist and she would enjoy watching them curdle and expire, and still, she would get to hear Edmund's screams. All had been perfect.

Had she known, she would have satisfied herself with one scream and the boy's blood pooling over her hands.

+

In the future, when she comes across another child like Edmund (and she will, she is sure, because history repeats itself, and she is the past and the future and is present for it all), there will be no Aslan. He will still be cleaning up in Galma: where she was called the Beautiful Terror, where a little island attempted to resist her might, where the rulers called upon their god but all that descended upon them was her destruction.

He is a god, after all, and just to be sure, she left behind seeds of doubt before she returned to her floating.

+

She gets to see Edmund Pevensie again.

She sees more of his brother, actually, and a wide-eyed boy who has the same voice as Caspian V (she saw him killed by the very mercenaries he trusted). But he is there, the feeling of his life almost within her grasp, and not the phantom flutter she felt in all her floating time.

This time, however, he is stronger. His life is still fragile, he is still human, but he knows how to guard himself. But she is determined, despite the incapability of her position as a ghost of the past, to conquer this new guard of his. She will hold power over his life once more, and she can almost taste the feeling as she reaches out, encouraging Peter (a boy-king once again) to free her and bring about the demise of his beloved brother.

Edmund's life force flutters around her again, at the small of her back, and she dismisses it as another phantom, born of eagerness.

It is a mistake.

+

When she first sees Rillian, she knows she has found her new favorite. There is Star blood in his veins mixed with humans, the glow of a Star muddled by human dullness. Confused and easily lead, with just a hint of his mother's ancestry so he doesn't break to pieces right away. She is pleased.

+

Rillian's life is easier to wrap her hands around than Edmund's. While she must spend more time preparing him, she enjoys the process more than she did with the Son of Adam.

The Son of the Stars (She scoffs at such a name. In his veins may run the blood of the Stars, but he is still a soft, weak human) is driven to revenge when she disposes of his mother, and he comes looking for her, seeking her out. The Son of Adam was not as quick: she waited two months for his return, and after such time he still failed her (though a part of her was glad that he does not bring his siblings, or she'd have had to deal with them first).

Edmund was won over more slowly. Turkish Delight endeared her to him, she knows, but only with sweet words and promises of wealth and power did he place his trust in her. But Rillian, shallow Prince Rillian, a boy tasting for the first time man's pleasure, is bought almost instantly.

She descends and flits through the trees, teasing him. She wears green like the forest, green so he has to look for her, to seek her out.

+

"Are you a fairy?" he asks. She laughs at his naïveté.

+

"You're beautiful," he whispers. She sees that he is ready and takes him in her arms, allowing him to touch her. His body is soft and grimy as she kisses him, but his life is fragile and delicate and she rejoices.

+

When he has pressed her against a tree and thinks he is in control, she responds the way she has heard the female humans respond, wrapping one leg around his.

When his hands begin to inch up her skirts, she holds him to her like a vice and they descend into the Underworld.

He is enchanted and she is pleased.

+

Within days, she is no longer pleased. Whatever sparkle Star's blood had promised is decidedly lacking.

Still, he follows her like a stupid puppy (he even _pants_ like an overheated dog, she thinks) and she offers her body as a reward, bit by bit. He is, after all, how she will rule again.

But when she holds his life between her two hands and watches it, laughing at its frailty, she can almost imagine it is Edmund's.

+

Even as the whole land rots, Narnia holds her at bay. So she digs underneath the land, far below, and raises a people who will work under the surface, where there are no enchantments except hers, no authority except hers, no will that is law except hers. Under the surface, everything is hers, from the loam roof to the very bedrock of the land.

She keeps Rillian complacent in her underground fortress (for her kingdom lies above, on the surface), feeding him more: promises of wealth and power like before, with a different favorite, because while Rillian is tempted by a different sort of sweet, both are humans and all humans are the same.

+

Then two human children arrive and she is reminded of a different world and a different time: another land she once tried to rule, where all the world was blazing white and hard red charred over with fire, where a body just like hers lay, flames still licking and sputtering the life in the body to a stop. A time when she wore black.

These children resist her charms, but she is powerful. She draws them in with sweet talk, heady music and song, encouraging them to bring about the demise of the beloved land of which they speak.

Their toad-man's squawking cuts through her spell and she knows it is time to take a more direct approach.

+

The snake form is something she picked up in Galma, when she wore blue like the sea. The Galmans feared snakes and she had used that, deliberately transforming before their very eyes so they knew her capabilities.

Before that, they had called her the Beautiful One. After that she became the Beautiful Terror.

+

History repeats itself, this she knows, but no matter how much history she witnesses, she will never know her own until it is too late and she is floating once more, thinking of her failures.

+

As the last membranes holding her head to her body are severed, she thinks that Rillian may be more like Edmund than she ever thought.

She conveniently forgets that the toad-man was also present and that his blade was twice as sharp.

+

She will float for a timeless amount of time, witnessing all in the Kingdom That Was Once Hers.

+

When a Son of Water is born, thousandth of that name but first of hers, she will wear gossamer purple.

And they will call her the Amethyst Witch.   
**_  
_**


End file.
